1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to a 3D image shooting apparatus and endoscope.
2. Description of the Related Art
An endoscope captures an image of an organism's organ by irradiating the entire wall surface of the organ, which is covered with a mucosa, with illuminating light. In the field of such endoscopes, in order to observe the 3D shape of the wall surface of the organ, it is important to extract information about the depth of the object. Meanwhile, in the field of surgical endoscopes, the region in surgery should be monitored three-dimensionally. To meet these demands, technologies for three-dimensional (3D) endoscopes have been developed. A 3D endoscope ordinarily adopts a “stereo vision system” that uses two lens-image sensor sets to obtain multi-viewpoint images by viewing the object from multiple different points. Such a stereo vision system can obtain a pair of multi-viewpoint images with parallax (which may be a left-eye image and a right-eye image, for example) from the same object at the same time, and therefore, can get information about the 3D shape of the object based on the multi-viewpoint images. However, it is difficult for a stereo vision system to perfectly match the characteristics of its two image sensors to each other, which is a problem with such a system. Thus, to avoid such a problem, a technology for a “single vision system” that uses only one lens-image sensor set to obtain multi-viewpoint images as disclosed in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2001-16611 has attracted a lot of attention these days.